• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 17, 2006

Television, ironically, has never been very good at the vision thing. As for its prefix, well, "tele" is Greek for "at a distance," and that seems to be exactly what Madison Avenue has been doing in recent months: distancing itself from television. The word, if not the medium.

MediaVest, the giant media shop that buys for Coca-Cola, Kraft, Procter & Gamble, and others, has dropped the word altogether. It now calls its buying groups "Video Investment and Activation," or VIA, units. That's especially symbolic, because MediaVest, an agency that was originally named TeleVest, has its roots in TV. But if MediaVest's buying chief, Donna Speciale, has her way, VIA will focus not on distribution channels like broadcast, cable, and satellite, but on the various ways consumers watch video programming. American Express has also abandoned the term television. The company now calls it "rolling video."

The reason for all this name-dropping is that television isn't just television anymore. It's any platform that video might appear on: personal computers, iPods, PSPs, cell phones, TiVos, Slingboxes -- a whole new generation of gizmo-media that cannot be called television, even if we use them to watch what we think of as "television."

Even Nielsen Media Research, the audience ratings firm that is practically synonymous with the medium, appears to be distancing itself from television. The company's new mission, CEO Susan Whiting says in her new corporate manifesto, is to "follow the video."Nielsen will continue to measure traditional, in-home TV viewing, but it will also begin measuring a portfolio of video platforms, including broadband, out-of-home, and portable video.

Don't get me wrong. Television is not endangered. Americans watched more of it last year than in any year previously, according to Whiting's outfit. It's just evolving into something else -- something bigger, broader, more ubiquitous, and more fluid than TV as we know it. Or, as Nielsen's Whiting describes it, into "any form of content that encompasses sight, sound, and motion."

The problem, she says, isn't that people aren't watching TV on these new platforms. It's that "no one has quite figured out how to really make money from these opportunities." Actually, Madison Avenue is beginning to figure it out. Though traditional TV still represents more than 70 percent of the budget of big national advertisers, margins have eroded for most agencies. The unbundling and media buying consolidation of the 1990s has created an ultra-competitive marketplace among the biggest shops, which now routinely buy network TV ad time for commission rates of well below 1 percent.

Meanwhile, agencies are getting very little compensation pressure from clients when it comes to buying new media, especially the Internet. While digital media can be heavily labor-intensive, agency chiefs like WPP Group's Martin Sorrell admit they still generate the highest margins of any area of their business -- well into the double-digits. Still wonder why Madison Avenue is distancing itself from the word "television?"

If the industry is having trouble developing business models to fit new media trends, it may have something to do with to the pace of the change. In the past, Madison Avenue and the media industry had years to adjust to fundamental shifts in the way consumers use media. Now those shifts are happening in a matter of months.

Not that big media are wasting any time. In the months since Walt Disney Co. struck its landmark deal with Apple to distribute prime-time TV shows via iTunes and onto portable players, most of the majors have jumped into the game. But as Albert Cheng, the Disney executive who masterminded that deal, acknowledged during MediaPost's recent OMMA Hollywood conference, it's not clear even to him how it will play out.

Asked what kinds of news programming is getting downloaded most avidly via iTunes, Cheng said, "The audience on the Internet is very different than the audience on television." Their interests, he said, tend to be in "a little bit of the weird and the odd types of stories. It's the giant squid that gets huge click-throughs."